PwC Pays for Priority

New Recruiting Tool for College Students Gives Accounting Firm Top Billing

In an unusual college-recruiting tactic, PricewaterhouseCoopers is paying millions of dollars to sponsor a new feature on career-networking site LinkedIn.

ENLARGE

Colleges that can access the new tool include New York University.
Bloomberg News

In a new section of LinkedIn's site, college students enter the name of their school, their major and the industry in which they want to work. LinkedIn then lists relevant job openings based on jobs that similar LinkedIn users pursued.

The feature, dubbed Career Explorer, came out of talks between LinkedIn Corp. and PwC. Initially, Career Explorer is only available to students at 60 colleges—which PwC chose. They're the campuses where it recruits the majority of its students, and include New York University, Michigan State University and the University of California at Berkeley. Eventually, the feature will be available to all LinkedIn users, say the companies.

For those 60 schools, PwC gets top billing in job listings, in a box labeled "featured job." It also gets a large space to promote careers at its company that will include biographical videos of employees and tips on resumé writing.

Otherwise, the results aren't influenced by PwC's sponsorship, say LinkedIn and PwC. Some pages of the sub-section will say that it is sponsored by PwC.

Despite overall high unemployement, the Big Four accounting firms are still competing to hire lots of college students. "They recruit at the same schools and they all want the top students," says Brad Karsh, president of JobBound, a career coaching firm. Accounting has weathered the economic crisis relatively well, he adds.

PwC says it plans to recruit about 5,500 undergraduates and graduate students from U.S. campuses for the year ending June 30, 2011, for internships and full-time jobs. That's up from 4,600 the prior year, and 4,800 the year before that.

Global revenue for PwC was $26.57 billion in the year ending June 30, up 1.5% from the year earlier, but down 5.7% from the year ending June 30, 2008. The North America and Caribbean region, the second-biggest source of revenue for PwC after Western Europe, was roughly flat at $8.9 billion.

Competitor Ernst & Young says it plans to hire 6,450 U.S. college students for full-time jobs and internships in the year ending June 30, 2011, while Deloitte LLP says it will hire 5,000 in the year ending May 31, 2011. KPMG plans to hire 3,400 in 2010, and 3,900 next year.

PwC has lagged its competitors in using social media to recruit. It launched its first Facebook and Twitter career pages in January 2010. Meanwhile, Ernst & Young has had a Facebook career page since 2006, where recruiters interact with students and answer questions about jobs. KPMG launched a Twitter account in 2009 managed by its recruiting team.

Starting Monday, when students at any of the 60 schools go to LinkedIn's site, they'll see a box asking them to try Career Explorer. Clicking the box takes them to a page where they enter information about their college, major and desired industry. A drop-down menu shows the top six jobs that LinkedIn users with similar backgrounds took as their first job. If a student selects one of those jobs, more results pop up showing possible second jobs based on what similar LinkedIn users took as their next job. The process repeats for more next-step jobs.

Career Explorer is owned by LinkedIn; the algorithms used to determine the career path results are based on the profile data of millions of its users.

When the feature becomes available to all LinkedIn users—at a not-yet-decided date—the PwC material won't be on the pages of users outside those 60 schools, says LinkedIn.

Holly Paul, PwC's U.S. recruiting leader, says that she hopes the partnership will strengthen the company's relationship with young recruits who are increasingly forming their first impression of employers on the Web.

In June 2009, PwC contacted LinkedIn and said that it wanted to do something innovative in social media and recruiting. LinkedIn told the firm about an early version of Career Explorer.

Over the next year and a half, PwC worked with LinkedIn to help develop the look of the feature. PwC organized several focus groups where college students looked at early versions of Career Explorer. Students said, for instance, that they wanted to know what their potential career options paid—information that neither LinkedIn nor PwC had. So Ms. Paul lobbied to have the information provided by an outside company.

This is the first deal of its kind for LinkedIn with a corporate partner. LinkedIn says that over time it will aim to acquire more corporate sponsors, though it wouldn't say whether any such deals were in the works. For now, PwC hopes its relationship with LinkedIn will help it seem like a more innovative and "edgy" employer, says Ms. Paul.

Corrections & Amplifications

Deloitte LLP says it will hire 5,000 U.S. college students for full-time jobs and internships in the year ending May 31, 2011. A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the company as Deloitte & Touche. Also, PricewaterhouseCoopers had revenue of $26.57 billion for the year ending June 30. A previous version of this article incorrectly said it was $26.5 billion.

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